Shringla’s scan, GR’s gambit

When Indian Foreign Secretary Harsh Vardhan Shringla met President Gotabaya Rajapaksa on Tuesday, it was back to square one. Not only was there no joint communique or joint media briefing at the end of the Shringla visit, the respective communiques issued by the two sides made it easy to spot the gaps and the inconsistencies. Also present at the meeting were Secretary to the President Dr. P.B. Jayasundera, Special Advisor Lalith Weeratunga and India’s High Commissioner Gopal Baglay 

Whatever economic real-estate acquired by India will not shift the incumbent Sri Lankan regime’s strategic alliance with China. While the strategically ‘thick’ alignment with China continues, the Gotabaya administration’s tactical moves at obtaining more wiggle-room and economic support by a fire-sale of national assets including strategic assets in the infrastructure and energy sectors, to India, USA and China, has torpedoed its own patriotic and nationalist credentials

Indian Foreign Secretary Harsh Shringla’s visit made two things clear: 

Firstly, that Delhi’s seemingly non-competitive policy of laissez-faire verging on benign neglect of its strategic interests in Sri Lanka had drawn to a close. It comes in the wake of a likely South Asia/Indian Ocean review at the Quad summit at the White House recently. 

Secondly, the India strategy of the Gotabaya Rajapaksa administration had failed in an important respect. The object of that strategy, of which High Commissioner Milinda Moragoda was a longstanding architect and advocate, was de-linking the Sri Lankan Tamil issue from India by means of material incentives. 

It was to be a bypass operation via a swap: trading-in economic real estate and enhanced defence cooperation with Delhi, in exchange for dropping the Tamil issue, the 13th Amendment and in effect, the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord. 

Moragoda-Gunaratna Mantra

The assumption was that India could be persuaded to sell-out Tamil autonomy and permit the Gotabaya presidency to resolve the matter purely domestically and unilaterally, in return for a greater economic footprint on this island which would open space for India to offset China’s presence and influence. This was the logic of the Moragoda roadmap and mandate. 

That was also the consensus among the hawks of the present administration, especially the retired military brass holding high positions in and out of Cabinet. Law and Order Minister Weerasekara, a retired high-ranking Navy officer, frequently went public with the view that the Indo-Lanka Accord was obsolete.

One of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s influential advisors, Prof. Rohan Gunaratna, was another early and prominent adherent of the theory of the dispensability of the 13th Amendment and devolution of power to the Tamil people. 

The Moragoda Map was eerily similar to the Jared Kushner ‘grand bargain’ for Palestine, which no one bought into (except a few Gulf states). 

The evidence of the failure of that strategy arrived with India’s Foreign Secretary. The morning after he touched down at Katunayake, the leading Tamil language newspaper the Sunday Veerakesari ran a page one lead story highlighted in a box, quoting him on the need for the implementation of the 13th Amendment as the best method of obtaining fairness for the Tamil people. The page one story was extracted from a longer interview which was published on the inside pages. 

When the Indian Foreign Secretary met President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, it was back to square one. Not only was there no joint communique or joint media briefing at the end of the Shringla visit, the respective communiques issued by the two sides made it easy to spot the gaps and the inconsistencies. 

The statement released by President Rajapaksa’s media division informed us as follows: 

“The President pointed out the urgent need to understand the weaknesses as well as the strengths of the 13th Amendment and act accordingly.”

What this clearly means is that the 13th Amendment will not be implemented in full. Provincial Council elections will not be held anytime soon, and if they are, the PCs will be hamstrung by the non-implementation of the 13th Amendment especially its vital provisions on land use, or worse, gutted by the downsizing of the 13th Amendment through new legislation or the new Constitution. 

Impairing Indo-Lanka relations

Drastic as this is, the implication for bilateral, i.e., Indo-Lanka relations is rather more serious. Even before Foreign Secretary Shringla presents his report to his Minister, Prime Minister Modi would already have a sense of President Gotabaya’s attempt to move unilaterally on the Tamil issue in complete violation of the Indo-Sri Lanka Accord, when he opened his newspapers on Wednesday morning and read Meera Srinivasan’s report. (Must look at weaknesses and strengths of 13A: Gotabaya Rajapaksa tells Harsh Vardhan Shringla – The Hindu – https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/must-look-at-weaknesses-and-strengths-of-13a-gotabaya-tells-shringla/article36848554.ece)

The Indian position was made clear in the communique issued at the conclusion of Foreign Secretary Shringla’s visit: 

“…Foreign Secretary thanked President for his guidance and close cooperation in the defence and security sphere. Further, he reiterated India’s position on complete implementation of the provisions under the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, including devolution of powers and the holding of Provincial Council elections at the earliest.”

The paragraph dealing with the meetings with the Tamil parties made amply clear that India’s position was consistent; it was saying the same thing to President GR as it was to them: 

“…[The] Foreign Secretary reiterated India’s longstanding support for the reconciliation that addresses aspirations of the Tamil community for equality, justice, peace and dignity within the united Sri Lanka and in accordance with the 13th Amendment.”

There are three key takeaways here. Firstly, whatever one may think of President GR’s stated position on 13A—and it might seem unexceptionable at first blush—it is not merely inconsistent with the pledge repeatedly made in wartime and in the immediate aftermath of victory by his brother President Mahinda Rajapaksa, but it is also inconsistent with the pledge that he himself made to Delhi repeatedly while Secretary/Defence and a member of the Troika (which went MIA in the postwar period). As no less a Realist than Machiavelli pointed out, a leader must be known to keep his word to other capitals-- to do otherwise and earn a reputation to that effect, is dangerous in external relations. 

Secondly, given the radical asymmetry between the President’s position and that of India on the Tamil question, which will always be a matter of indispensable domestic geopolitics to India (given Tamil Nadu and now, the dynamic new Chief Minister), Sri Lanka will be unable to leverage to the fullest, the economic, financial and diplomatic support that it could have and the Sri Lankan Cabinet of Ministers, starting with Basil Rajapaksa, seems to have hoped for. 

Thirdly, the Tamil parties need the endorsement of a state to offset aggressive asymmetry, but not even the USA will take a stand unilaterally on the Tamil question, and will always defer to India. To defend devolved political space, it is imperative for the Tamil parties to take a joint and consistent stand within India’s stated parameters rather than seeking to supersede a unitary state containing moderate devolution, and ending up in a unitary state without devolution or in what Sri Lanka would have been with only District Development Councils (1980) and no Indo-Sri Lanka Accord (1987). 

Beijing’s brothers

President Gotabaya Rajapaksa made a pitch to India for support on an international initiative: 

“The President elaborated on the need to re-establish the friendship and relations between India and Sri Lanka that existed in the 1960s and ’70s. President Rajapaksa said that he is expecting to obtain India’s support in advancing the 1971 proposal made by Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike to declare the Indian Ocean a peace zone…”

There is however a glaring difference between Ceylon’s and especially Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike’s exquisite ambidexterity in balancing relations with India and China. GR’s own visible tilt to China makes a return to the relationship of the 1960s and 1970s impossible. The Indian Ocean Peace Zone (IOPZ) proposal cannot be made with credibility and legitimacy by a leader who is seen as a close ally of China, one of the two competing sides in the great power rivalry in the Indo-Pacific. 

As China’s Ambassador to Colombo writes in a special article to mark the 72nd anniversary of the victory of the Chinese revolution:

“This year 2021 is also an extraordinary one in the history of China-Sri Lanka relations. President Xi Jinping and President Gotabaya Rajapaksa have provided new strategic guidance for the further deepening of China-Sri Lanka relations through several phone calls and correspondence. Premier Li Keqiang and Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa virtually attended same international forum together. Chairman of Chinese NPC Li Zhanshu and Speaker of Sri Lankan Parliament Mahinda Yapa Abeywardena held a fruitful online meeting, while the two countries’ foreign, defence, commercial chiefs also maintained close communication. The political and strategic mutual trust between China and Sri Lanka has reached a new height.” (China now more confident in forging ahead to deepen strategic ties with Sri Lanka | Daily FT – https://www.ft.lk/front-page/China-now-more-confident-in-forging-ahead-to-deepen-strategic-ties-with-Sri-Lanka/44-723807)

Whatever economic real-estate acquired by India will not shift the incumbent Sri Lankan regime’s strategic alliance with China. 

While the strategically ‘thick’ alignment with China continues, the Gotabaya administration’s tactical moves at obtaining more wiggle-room and economic support by a fire-sale of national assets including strategic assets in the infrastructure and energy sectors, to India, USA and China, has torpedoed its own patriotic and nationalist credentials.

Cabraal has relaxed some restrictions and introduced a degree of pragmatism in crisis-management, but the changes are tactical at best, cosmetic at worst, and secondary in importance anyway you look at it. He relaxed the (second) set of deterrents to imports, but not the (first) list of outright prohibitions. That exhaustive list of items which cannot be imported, signed by Dr. P.B. Jayasundera, remains. That’s not the most significant of the macroeconomic policy corrections Nivard did not or could not make. There’s an impending train wreck and nothing is changing the speed and direction of the train

Imminent implosion 

It’s a season of retro-chic: Prof. G.L. Peiris and Ajith Nivard Cabraal returned to the posts they had been appointed by President Mahinda Rajapaksa. Both got off to a fair start. 

Cabraal has relaxed some restrictions and introduced a degree of pragmatism in crisis-management, but the changes are tactical at best, cosmetic at worst, and secondary in importance anyway you look at it. He relaxed the (second) set of deterrents to imports, but not the (first) list of outright prohibitions. That exhaustive list of items which cannot be imported, signed by Dr. P.B. Jayasundera, remains.

That’s not the most significant of the macroeconomic policy corrections Nivard did not or could not make. There’s an impending train wreck and nothing is changing the speed and direction of the train. 

Many features of the agrarian crisis have already been talked and written about but there is one that hasn’t. Let’s revisit what is in the public domain, every night on the TV news. Crops as diverse as potatoes and tea are failing not only because of the ban on chemical fertiliser but also on weedicides and pesticides. The shortage of food crops will cause a price spiral on the one hand and a reduction of export incomes on the other, while necessitating food imports, thereby heightening the foreign exchange crisis.

There is a deeper dimension that has escaped the Government’s attention. There will be a collapse of peasant incomes and therefore the incomes of peasant families, nuclear and extended. This will cause a compression of whatever rural prosperity there was. The pauperisation of the peasantry will shrink the demand for goods, most of which are locally produced. In short the domestic market will shrink. 

Given that the predominant logic of the regime’s economic model is one of a ‘national economy’ driven by import substitution industrialisation, the collapse of peasant/rural incomes and the depression of a significant part of the domestic market, plus the external market due to failure of export crops, will wreck the model itself. 

This of course brings into focus yet again, the counterproductive irrationality of the regime’s strategy and policies. Not only is the model a bad one, the policies adopted are inconsistent with the functioning of the model itself. 

This is also where political economy, rather than simply economics, comes in. The hyper-centralist model of the state which resulted from the 20th amendment, and the added sprouting of militarised task forces, clogs the feedback loops of the decision-making apparatus and process. 

Meanwhile, the imminent peasant protests, the urban solidarity they will evoke, and the “harsh measures” of repression that the irrepressible Minister of Law and Order, Sarath Weerasekara, ex-naval admiral, has publicly committed to, will set off a spiral of instability that no IMF macroeconomic stabilisation package can contain. Such a package may enhance and accelerate social and political instability.

IMF issue

It isn’t only the Government that ignores the political economy of development in favour of economic experimentation. The entire debate that consumes the economic policy intelligentsia today, namely, “To go or not to go to the IMF?” is a false problem. The IMF is neither the hellish torture chamber that it is for the dogmatic left and xenophobic nationalists, nor the Sacred Temple that it is for Sri Lanka’s rightwing ‘liberal’ economists and politicians. 

Given the crazy policies of the present regime there might be a worse fate than going to the IMF, but that is not the central question. The crucial question (especially for anyone in the Opposition ranks) is or should be: what is the red-line in any negotiations with the IMF? Given that the masses are already suffering for the sins of this and earlier governments, what is the kind of austerity program that the democratic republican State must rule out; what are the cutbacks and burdens on the masses that it should reject, in any talks with the IMF? 

As Prof. Yanis Varoufakis, former Finance Minister of Greece said, the question is not about engagement with the international financial institutions, it is the point at which we are not ready to capitulate or concede, and are ready to walk out and adopt alternatives to protect the living standards and rights of the people from an unfair austerity package.

The most astounding economic success story of our lifetimes, is the elimination by China of absolute poverty of a country with over a billion people, within the space of a single generation. The story of the East Asian Tigers is, according to Robert Wade of Cambridge, to name just one scholar, the story of state-led industrialisation. These facts are astoundingly absent in the discourse of Lanka’s rightwing liberal economists. 

Only the Middle Way of a mixed-economy works in Sri Lanka, and the Premadasa policy paradigm is the most—or only—successful one we’ve experienced in development economics, actually achieving rapid growth with equity. 

There is a deeper dimension that has escaped the Government’s attention. There will be a collapse of peasant incomes and therefore the incomes of peasant families, nuclear and extended. This will cause a compression of whatever rural prosperity there was. The pauperisation of the peasantry will shrink the demand for goods, most of which are locally produced. In short the domestic market will shrink. Given that the predominant logic of the regime’s economic model is one of a ‘national economy’ driven by import substitution industrialisation, the collapse of peasant/rural incomes and the depression of a significant part of the domestic market, plus the external market due to failure of export crops, will wreck the model itself

Warlike Weerasekara 

Law and Order Minister Sarath Weerasekara made a needlessly aggressive remark about the need for tough measures against teachers unions, and repeated it when it triggered controversy. It provoked the teachers into resuming their protest on 6 October, leaving Education Minister Dinesh Gunawardena to face the music.

Weerasekara is obviously ignorant of the fate of a far superior authoritarian personality, Felix Dias Bandaranaike. In his arrogance and with his wit, he remarked that that the country needed “a little bit of totalitarianism” – a line very similar to Weerasekara’s. FDB was never able to live that down for the rest of his days. That remark was the inspiration for his later nickname “Satan” (given by former coalition partner Dr. N.M. Perera) and Gamini Fonseka’s retrospective movie ‘Sagarayak Meda,’ in which FDB is even more of a villain than Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike. FDB’s political fate was sealed starting with his defeat in his home seat of Dompe. 

Weerasekara’s confrontation mode towards teachers, school principals and students is also reminiscent of the stance of the UNP’s Minister of Education in 1965-’70, a Sinhala nationalist and literary figure, I.M.R.A. Iriyagolla. His conduct and discourse catalysed the massive door-to-door campaign by the university community during the 1970 General Election which swept out the Senanayake Government and gave a two-thirds majority to the SLFP-Left coalition. The movement of university students and academics made a special effort to target Iriyagolla in their door-to-door campaign, and it succeeded. I can’t even recall the fate of I.M.R.A. Iriyagolla; he never re-emerged in public life, let alone politics, after 1970.

To be fair by Sarath Weerasekara, an explanation other than pure blundering through temperament and inexperience, is possible. What if Lt-Gen. Mike Flynn had been a member of Trump’s Cabinet, say the Secretary of Defence or Homeland Security?